On June 19th, the FAO published a report noting that there are more hungry people than ever in the world: over 1 billion. Acute malnutrition affects around 55 million children worldwide and leads to five million childhood deaths each year. The saddest part is that it’s preventable; we can do something to help.

Join Action Against Hunger’s international initiative, No Hunger, and let’s encourage Al Gore to make his next film about global hunger, a crisis that is killing one child every six seconds. This website features a trailer for No Hungerand a petition to the former VP. In the same way that An InconvenientTruth helped generate educated discussion and reshaped perceptions of climate change, No Hunger could help attract the public support needed to help reach malnourished children.

The No Hungerinitiative, which began in Madrid, has already collected more than 64,000 signatures and will be presented to Al Gore in December at the climate change conference in Copenhagen.

Unlike cures for many diseases, treatment for sever acute malnutrition isn’t expensive. It costs roughly $50 and prescription drugs aren’t required; instead, it relies on nutrient-dense, ready-to-use food products such as plumpy’nut, that can take a child from the brink of death and restore him or her to health in as little as six weeks.

It only takes a few seconds and it may be able to make a huge difference on the way people view hunger. Let’s help!

Also, I was actually going to post a picture of what a truly malnourished child looks like, but the images were so disturbing that I couldn’t bring myself to actually put them up. Take a moment and see what malnourished children look like; it’s heart-wrenching.

Shannon Kircher is the founder and editor of The Wanderlust Effect, formerly The Traveling Scholar. Founded in 2009, she has continued to document her international escapes as an expat in Europe and the Caribbean. She is a former resident of London and San Francisco and now calls the island of Anguilla home. In addition to The Wanderlust Effect, Shannon is the Director of Marketing for the Frangipani Beach Resort and is on the Board of Directors of the Omololu International School in Anguilla.